Science Fiction and Fantasy Authors Editing and Proofreading Services

Your reader will forgive almost anything except a world that changes its mind. Faster-than-light travel, gods who answer, a magic that costs memory — all of it is accepted in the first chapter without argument. What is never forgiven is the moment in chapter thirty when the rules bend to let a character out of trouble, because that is when the reader stops believing the danger was ever real.

We work on what science fiction and fantasy writers produce — full manuscripts and partials, opening chapters and submission packages, the rules of a magic or technological system and their consistency, worldbuilding documents and series bibles, synopses for agents, novellas and short fiction, invented terminology and naming, appendices and glossaries, series continuity across books, and the material that goes out to agents and editors. Our editors work on the rules and whether the book keeps them.

The limits of the system are where speculative fiction earns its stakes, and the writing failure is that limits get defined loosely and applied conveniently. What a magic can do is worldbuilding; what it cannot do is plot. We work through manuscripts so the constraints are stated or demonstrated early, since a cost introduced at the moment it becomes dramatically useful reads as an invention rather than a rule; so the price is paid visibly every time and not only when the scene needs weight, because a magic that exhausts the user in chapter four and not in chapter nineteen has no price at all; so any exception is set up long before it is needed and costs more than the rule it breaks; so the obvious application is addressed — if the technology can do this, a reader will immediately ask why it is not being used for that, and the book must have an answer even if it is one line; so the terminology is consistent and not so dense that the first chapter requires a glossary, given that invented words are a budget and most manuscripts overspend in the opening pages; and so the series bible records what has been established rather than what was intended. Manuscripts checked this way keep their danger.

Everything you send us stays confidential, including unpublished manuscripts, worldbuilding material and series plans. We are editors rather than agents or publishers, and we offer no view on your world, your premise or your book's prospects. What we can do is find the places where the rules bent.